Optimizing Memory for DOS Applications

If you run only Windows applications, especially 32-bit applications, you may never have to worry about memory. More accurately, you might worry about the total amount of mem-ory in your system (the more, the merrier), but you never have to worry about how that memory is managed. Windows 98's Virtual Memory Manager takes care of all the dirty work of memory paging, disk caching, and so on. (I described how this works in Chapter 9.)

This is also true for DOS programs, although to a lesser extent. As long as you run the DOS program under Windows 98 (either in a window or full-screen), the Virtual Memory Manager will still take care of the virtual memory supplied to the DOS virtual machine. No matter what kind of memory the program needs—conventional, extended, expanded, or whatever—the VMM can dish it out. However, there are two ways you can manipulate memory for DOS programs run under Windows 98: